In Sharnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men, a woman becomes a tree, another dies twice, and a third finds herself looking at men without heads. It is an utterly bizarre and entirely enrapturing read, especially for such a small book; it is a true feat to have so much included within its pages. Parsipur sets her novella within the 1953 coup d'état in Iran, when Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown and the Shah’s power was strengthened through British and American backing. It is a book in which political brutality and magical impossibility are entwined so naturally that it raises the question of reality itself being the greater absurdity. The novella follows five women whose lives—each affected by the patriarchal systems they exist within—eventually draw them towards a house outside Tehran. There, in a place where they are finally granted freedom to exist, they begin to test what it might mean to live in a world where they can finally name their own futures. First published in Persian in 1989, later banned in Iran, and followed by Parsipur’s imprisonment after publication, Women Without Men was regarded scandalous for its treatment of women and their sexual desires. Now, it is on the longlist for the 2026 International Booker Prize and has been read by thousands world-wide.
The problem was that she had an unbounded awareness of things, an awareness that instilled undue caution in her, making her fearful that action would lead to ignominy, humiliation. This created in her a desire to be ordinary, average. Yet she did not truly know what it meant to be ordinary.
I also became truly enamoured by the allusions to Iranian mysticism and, mostly, how similar Mahdokht’s transformation into a tree is to the Greek myth of Daphne. In the Greek tale, Daphne escapes Apollo by becoming a tree. This was a terrible salvation by which a woman preserved herself only by ceasing to be a woman at all. Mahdokht’s own metamorphosis into a tree, despite being the same transformation, carries a different tone. Her revulsion at seeing the gardener with a young unmarried woman revealed how she has internalised female shame, resulting in hideous thoughts of violence and brutality. From this, turning into a tree is her only imagined escape to be free and remain a virgin. It is her choice, despite it being a choice informed by the patriarchal standards surrounding her. But then, when this decision starts becoming reality, there is a momentarily lovely image of people gathering around her, tending to her, and helping her grow. This time is entangled with physical pain for Mahdokht, but, especially read against Daphne’s story, there is also a sense of possibility. It speaks to each woman's metamorphosis as, in whichever way it is carried out, each one reclaims who they are in the world. They become far more than they were ever deemed to be.
An aspect of this book I thoroughly enjoyed is that not all of its women are easy to like, in fact, I’d argue that none of them are written to be. There is no idealised version of womanhood here. They are vain, self-interested, abrasive, snobbish, frightened, contradictory and, at times, cruel. I admired this enormously; Parsipur does not make female suffering contingent upon virtue or likeability. Freedom is not only for the morally exemplary, and there is no ideal woman here waiting to be rescued. Instead, these are women shaped by the conditions they have endured, and who are therefore difficult, but entirely human. They may have been formed by the harshness they have lived in, but they are not made reducible to it.
The women’s separate stories eventually converge in a shared house and orchard they begin to build and maintain together. Removed from the city, and with it the judgements and violences that have so thoroughly dictated their lives, the orchard does, for a time, carry the air of something utopian. It is one of the few spaces in the novella that belongs to the women themselves. They all help each other, even when unwilling or unknowingly at times. Nonetheless, despite the dream-like quality it may hold, it is not presented as a seamless place of female separatism. All of the women arrive carrying shame, fear, memory, grief, and little habits their previous lives produced within them. Instead, it feels almost like a suspended space where they begin to imagine themselves differently, they can talk to each other freely and start choosing what comes next. Women so often appear in patriarchal structures as beings spoken about, spoken for or spoken over. In the orchard, they may say what they want, or discover what they even want at all. It is not paradise, but they are given a place to find themselves again, and the future they discover themselves wanting.
Of course, they say, ignorance is bliss, but I had decided to walk the path of enlightenment even if it meant suffering hardships.
Surprisingly, in this garden of freedom from patriarchy, there is a male gardener. When he entered the novella, I found myself entirely shocked by his presence and Zarrinkolah’s relation to him. Zarrinkolah has come to see men as headless. To strip men of their heads is to strip them of thought and of individuality; it is to see them as bodies moving through the world as power without conscience or individuality. The gardener is the first man Zarrinkolah sees with a head since it all began. It suggests, at the very least, that he stands outside of the order Zarrinkolah knows men to be within. He is not experienced by her as one more faceless instrument of harm and is, instead, a whole being. Because the novel never clearly states she sees other men with heads again, the gardener is a particular exception to note. He does not seem to be there to undo the novel’s critique of men; instead, he seems to push the narrative that the garden is not meant to be a dream-world with no men. It is a dream-world where women can choose how to live, and in which men, should they enter, do so without conquest.
That is why I do not think the title Women Without Men is really about the literal feasibility of women living wholly without men. From my reading, Parispur does not seem to be imagining the absence of men so much as the collapse of the meanings men (and the patriarchal world built around them) have imposed upon womanhood. In this novella, women are only allowed to be certain things: a virgin then a wife, a keeper of family honour, a domestic labourer. I read the women as ones attempting, in different ways, to unlearn what they have been taught their worth is. They are not all free, but they are reaching towards a self outside the patriarchy’s terms. However outrageous that new self may look, it is a form they chose for themselves. The title seems to reimagine personhood, pointing to women that are released from their gender being the only factor of their being.
Faridoun Farrokh’s translation of this book has beautiful directness and bite. The language is simple, and the chapters quickly reach their point, yet the impact of what is left behind lingers throughout the book. The plainness of the prose allows the strangeness to stay strange without excessive explanation dulling it down. This style of writing also allows Parsipur to address sex, virginity, violence, and politics without euphemism, and Farrokh’s translation firmly preserves that. I found this was something especially important in a novel that showcases how women are narrated by others. The prose refuses to soften the brutality of what we are reading about, a severity that makes the story even more impactful.
For a fleeting moment he thought that if Fa’iza had been his sister, he would have killed her for such indiscretion. But of course she was not his sister and her conduct was not of his concern. Besides, she was the source of consolation and reassurance that he most needed under the circumstances.
The part of the book that stood out to me the most was the combination of brutality and hope. Parsipur seems plainly angry, and the book is better for it. It has no patience for a world that asks women to live in fear or shame, then pretends such an arrangement is natural. But the book is not all anger. Even where the world is shown to be hostile, the novella insists that women may still imagine themselves otherwise, even when every social and political force around them attempts to stop them from wanting more. To imagine another life exposes the insufficiency of the present one. It asks: what could be more unrealistic, a woman turning into a tree, or accepting that oppression is the final measure of what is possible? In a world so invested in reducing women to what is done to them, I deeply loved how this book, in turn, invests its time in asking what else they might yet become.
I can see why some readers might find the ending slightly disappointing, or at least anticlimactic. There is no grand collective liberation, no singular moment where the women we have followed march, hand in hand, into a symbolic sunset. Instead, they disperse. Each is left with her own ending, her own future shaped by what she has endured and what she has desired. Anything more sweeping would, I think, have diminished this novella. These women have not suffered in the same ways, nor have they imagined freedom to be the same. Their temperaments, longings, and capacities for reinvention are all too different from each other to all be rewarded with the same conclusion. This ending preserves the importance of difference. It allows each woman the dignity of her own fate, rather than forcing her into a shared cathartic ending. I admired that enormously, because, in doing so, it remains faithful to the women here whose lives are not simple enough to deserve such a ‘one for all’ ending.
[...] go in search of darkness anew. Descend to the depths, to the depth of depths. There you will see the light aglow in your hands, by your side. That is being human. Now, go become human.
In the end, I found this story both difficult and rewarding—difficult, because it is unapologetically strange: tonally elusive and, at points, unflinching in its depiction of violence against women. There is a severity to it that can be hard to sit with, and I felt I could never truly keep up with where it was going. And yet, it is rewarding for many of the same reasons. Despite being deeply unsettling, it is also unexpectedly hopeful. However brutal the world may be, however shamefully arranged against women, the novella insists that the self may still imagine itself otherwise. It is an odd but wondrous book, far harsher and sadder than the fable-like premise initially suggests, but one with real courage. If you desire to read something that will provoke a plethora of confusing emotions within you, look no further than Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men.